Remembering Jack McCarthy

Jack McCarthy once brought a Worcester crowd to a standing ovation with an epic poem about Latin class. The poem was titled “Magnum Iter,” recited at the long-gone Eleni's Midnite Café round about 1997, and it centered on a terror-inducing Latin teacher, Mr. Hatch:

We were ripe for intimidation
and the most inimitable intimidator
of all was Mister Hatch. He taught
Latin and his classroom was right
next to the marble portal inscribed
Huc venite pueri ut viri sitis-
“Come this way, boys, that you may be men.”
The road to manhood ran past Mister Hatch.
He was the legend of legends.
To pass his room when Latin I
was getting out — the door bursts open
and fourteen boys of wildly various sizes
various amounts of ankle showing
explode into the corridorsome of them in tears.
There they mill
like survivors of a terrorist bomb,
oblivious to traffic patterns, and to
passersby who haven't shared their
ordeal, comparing desperate notes-
“What did he say the homework was?”
“When do we have to have that memorized?”
“My brother — did my brother make it out?
HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY BROTHER?”
The poem was about more than that, of course — it was about his relationship with his own father, and about growing into adulthood as his parents died. It's a staggering piece of work — equal parts hilarious, personal and deeply, deeply affecting. The crowd — no stranger to the frequent visitor from Boston — leapt to their feet when the poem concluded.
McCarthy died Thursday, after a long battle with cancer, at the age of 74. He and his wife had been living in Washington, although he traveled back to New England frequently, including a two-year stint teaching at the low-residency MFA in poetry program at New England College, in Henniker, N.H. He performed regularly in Worcester, most notably for the Worcester Poets' Asylum and a memorable installment of The Kitchen Sessions, the underground poetry series run out of then-Worcester poet Mike McGee's Vernon Hill apartment. McCarthy even served on the 2000 Worcester poetry slam team, ranking 10th overall as an individual in that year's National Poetry Slam Finals.
To say that he was well-loved, both locally and elsewhere, is an understatement — one need only look at the truly staggering amount of testimonials on his Facebook page to see the depth of affection poetry lovers bore for him. Many of his friends and fans have been sharing videos of his work online, most notably one of his signature poems, “Careful What You Ask For”:
The poem is a perfect encapsulation of his style: side-splittingly funny at times, transitioning into a more gentle tone, then building to an absolutely heartbreaking crescendo. Make no mistake, McCarthy was a consummate storyteller. But more than that, there was always something genuine about the man, an honest kindness and generosity of spirit that was unmistakable. McCarthy was very interested in people, and could often be seen listening intently at open readings, taking notes so he could discuss poems with the writers. He made friends easily. It was difficult not to like him instantly.
McCarthy leaves behind a literary legacy of four full-length collections: “Good Night, Grace Notes” and “What I Saw,” from EM Press; “Almost A Remembrance: Shorter Poems,” from Moonpie Press; and the forthcoming “Drunks and Other Poems of Recovery,” from Write Bloody Publishing, along with numerous poems in collections and caught on video.
But his real legacy is as an inspiration for a generation of poets, for whom he was something of a fixed star to navigate by, proof positive that age and personal hardships could be overcome, that it was never too late to be the person that you wanted to be. He was, in a lot of ways, the inverse of his terrifying Mr. Hatch — a gentle teacher whose approval it was, nonetheless, difficult not to crave.
Sharing the news of his death on Facebook, his daughter Kathleen also shared a bit of one of McCarthy's poems, “The Spaces Between”:
It hurts
when love dies.
When love is deep,
it hurts deeply—
more deeply maybe than you thought
anything would ever hurt
again.
But with time,
the spaces between the moments when it hurts
get longer,
the moments themselves become
less devastating,
till eventually you come to associate them
with a sad sweetness
that has as much in common
with love
as it does with grief.
I wish you long
spaces in between,
and may you carry into them
all of that sweetness,
and only enough sadness to attest
the risk that's being taken
by everyone who loves you.
As always, McCarthy said it better and more clearly than anybody else could. (Victor D. Infante)